


Unspoken

by shit-escalates (Schm0use)



Series: Modern Institute [2]
Category: Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown
Genre: Drabble, Embedded Images
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 02:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4246866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schm0use/pseuds/shit-escalates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A glass of scotch, a darkened office. Another Mother's Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unspoken

  


Fitchner shut his laptop with a snap and aggressively poured himself another glass of scotch. That damn boy, that idiot of a boy he’d raised…

Sevro made it a point to try to get a rise out of him every year, on this day. Mother’s Day. Now he was out of the house and still managing to make things difficult. Make things painful.

Tagging him on Tumblr to make insensitive jokes, Sevro, really? He snorted. The boy must be thinking about her today as well. It was his first year living on his own, after all.

Fitchner opened the side drawer of his desk and pulled out a small picture frame.

He had one picture of Bryn that he kept faithfully, not hidden and boxed away like all the others. It was a picture of her sitting at their kitchen table, in their old house. She would sit there and read, starting from when she got home from teaching in the afternoon, straight through to evening, one leg pulled up onto the chair so she could rest her chin on her knee. She read while he cooked dinner, and she read as they ate, sometimes absently missing her mouth with her fork, so engrossed was she in her stories.

He used to watch her as she turned the pages, watch the nuances of a smile or surprise or sadness on her face, watch her bright eyes as they flicked over words and sentences, devouring them even as she moved onto the next.

He loved watching her read.

The one photo of Bryn that he keeps in his desk is a picture of her from the side, taken while she was unaware, fire red curls obscuring her face from view as she gazed down at a book, lost to the world around her.

On rare occasions, like that particular day of the year, he would take out her picture and look at it, and imagine, for one brief second, that he might talk to Sevro about his mother.

_Without her, you wouldn’t be around_ , he’d said to the boy. He takes another sip of his drink.

_Without you, she still would be_ , the implied, unspoken words.

Words he would never say, but there were days when he wanted to, wanted to spit them back into his own son’s smirking face, wanted to watch the boy crumple from the realization. But would he? Sevro had never known Bryn. He had never known the mischief of her smile, or the brightness of her eyes, or the stubborn set of her shoulders.

It was for those reasons that Fitchner could never imagine flaying him with accusations of his mother’s death. Because, though Sevro had never seen those things, he had them. Her smile, her eyes, her obstinence. He had them all.

Sometimes, there were more words Fitchner wanted to tell his son. More things left unspoken, because he was not sure Sevro would understand. More than that, he was afraid he wouldn’t. But if he were unafraid, he would tell him:

_Because of you, she is still here._


End file.
